Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Taxes and more taxes

Boy its really late, and I sit here reading the blogs and stuff not even knowing it is way past my bedtime. Why am I such a night owl? I really don't know the answer to that question, but I have always been a late night kind of fellow.

Over in Viet Nam, I was always awake most of the night, as we had to have someone awake at all hours on our front line bunker. They caught people asleep when they were supposed to be on watch. I never could imagine how you could fall asleep at your post during a war! It always cost them a stripe and a pay grade. But it could have cost them their life.

Today was a bad day, as we had to mail off the income tax estimates and then decided to mail in our tax return that we had extended. I always wait and file after the April rush. This causes my return not to be in the big pile of candidates for an audit. Ours will be recorded long after the summer audits have been chosen.

This is a little trick that some of my senior accountants at the CPA firm taught me many years ago.

So since I was dealing with pain, I decided to go over to the DMV and bear with the license bureau to purchase all those yearly tags. It is expensive here in Johnson County Kansas to license a vehicle. If I lived only a few miles South, Miami County is much cheaper. Each county sets its own rates for car tags.

I spent the afternoon scraping off the old stickers and carefully placing the new stickers in their place. I even went over to the storage place and did the motorhome. But get this, the Camry cost more to register than the Motorhome. Here in Kansas they passed a law licensing the RV's as though they are trucks. I don't know the idea, but Kansas is cheap for the RV. So perhaps that will balance out the high prices for the car tags.

Tonight I spent most of the evening on the phone with my older son down in Florida, and then with a friend from Des Moines. I'm not sure how that came about, but thanks to a nation wide plan, and Skype, it won't cost anything extra.

So it was boring around here today, unless you like filing taxes and standing in line waiting for the next available agent to take your money. Lets see, you have to stand in line in order to give them your money........

Wouldn't you think they would be nice to you while you give them the taxes???

4 comments:

That's what ticks me off about grocery stores too - you stand in line to give them your money. I guess if they opened a cash for every person, groceries would be prohibitively expensive though. Maybe the same at the license bureau?

Wow...filing taxes...yep, boring! The only thing more boring would be working as an agent there. Can you imagine an entire day looking over that paperwork. I'm sure they sniff the white out on their breaks ;) just kidding!